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Cryptic Comparison

Sun began shipping the SPARC T1 CPU in servers in 2005. That CPU had a cryptographic accelerator in it. Later, the SPARC T2 improved things by implementing a crypto engine in each of the 8 cores. This was further enhanced in the recently released SPARC T3. Over the past few months I have seen vague statements about cryptographic acceleration in the newest Intel CPUs, but did not see any details. I wondered if each implementation had strengths and weaknesses. Understanding those could help people when choosing a CPU architecture.

The new instruction in the Intel chip was to assist in Crypto work, but the CPU has to stall while it works on it, if I remember correctly.

Contrast this to the T Series - the Crypto units are completely parallel... simply speaking, the CPU dump a pointer to the Crypto core to work on on a set of bytes to encrypt/decrypt, the Crypto core ends a message back to the CPU when it is done.

I think this is pretty close to how it all works, considering that I did not design the CPU's.

In total, for workloads that are heavily encrypted (databases, file systems, web servers, middleware, etc.) - the T processors are the processor of choice. It makes NO SENSE to buy CPU's without Crypto engines (i.e. Intel) where the central processing power that you are paying licensing points for has to burn those license points doing Crypto work instead of off-loading the work to 8 or 16 different crypto engines (for free) and then only pay your licensing for the work that the CPU is really doing for your applications.